Automating operations
Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Tony Lockard
Avoid the workflow to nowhere by creating a new framework for digital content.
Data management
Data is the fuel that powers the workflow engine as all automated decisions and events are driven by the data entered or created as part of the process. Without accurate and consistent data, the automated workflows cannot function and either stall with an exception or complete with potentially incorrect deliverables. Integrated, consistent, open and accurate business, asset and event data repositories are the cornerstone of any successful automation environment.
Unified physical and file-based media management
Many organizations maintain multiple disparate content stores. This is a natural outgrowth of the workflow island issue as many systems maintain their own databases of media and metadata. This duplication of data in several disparate systems adds rework and risk of error across the organization as personnel typically need to re-enter the same data into the various systems.
By consolidating the organization’s physical and digital assets into a unified repository, or implementing a unified metadata repository linking the disparate asset stores, workflows can better manage the movement, manipulation and status of all content required by the various automated processes in the enterprise. In addition, they can reduce the complexity and human effort required to manage the metadata entry, security and other media management tasks within the organization.
Comprehensive resource management
Centralized maintenance of the various attributes for people, devices and locations is a fundamental benefit of a resource management system. Each resource entity can have a series of related attributes that define its capacity, availability and capabilities. The workflow system can take advantage of these attributes to optimize automated resource allocation across the various workflows in the enterprise. Without a database of resource availability, capacity and capability to drive the automated workflow, many nontrivial workflow events will require human intervention to complete.
Central queue
In order to effectively provide for end-to-end process control and heterogeneous queuing across multiple technology vendors, organizations need to provide for a centralized control point for all tasks involved in the various automation workflows running in the enterprise. The centralized queues provide the “queue of queues” that allow processes, events and messages to traverse multiple proprietary vendor systems. The central queue can also be leveraged as the one place to manage and apply business rules to messages and processes as they move through the enterprise workflow system. Additionally, it allows for consistent and manageable application of business rules. The central queue also provides a messaging backbone and gateway and allows for the processing, transformation, and validation of real and non real-time messages and events throughout the various workflows.
Open integration environment
The final requirement for any enterprise workflow system is an open and extensible integration environment. The media management and automation market has a history of closed and proprietary systems. During the last few years, this has begun to change, and most of the major vendors in the broadcast, post-production and media management space have started to embrace standards-based messaging and data storage architectures. Standards bodies such as SMPTE and EBU are active in this area as well and have pushed technologies like XML, Web services, SOAP and TCP as the foundation for many of their standards efforts. The new BXF standard is a recent example of this trend.
Careful selection of a robust enterprise workflow management system built upon a technology platform with strong data management and open standards can provide significant cost, resource and time savings.
Conclusion
Many organizations are facing the daunting task of moving from manual- to automation-driven work processes in 2009. This can be made less difficult by developing a framework for the analysis, design and selection of these new workflows. It helps to look at automation technologies from an end-to-end perspective in order to prevent islands of automation connected by manual human tasks and thus provide the maximum benefit from implementing automation within the organization.
Tony Lockard is senior vice president of business development at Xytech Systems.
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